Health of NYC citizens based on air pollution and trees
For ages it has been a consistent topic that we are getting further and further away from nature and how it is affecting our lifestyles and health. There has been many researches on this topic and it was always clear that environmental factors do play a huge role in our life and well-being. In recent years there has been an increasing effort in maintaining and bringing back a green environment to places which were struggling in that regard. Not surprisingly the most affected areas by this problem are cities and heavily industrialized towns. Even though it is very prevalent now how much of an effect environmental factors have on health many people still have to live under detrimental circumstances. Many different factors contribute to a healthy environment, including the quality of air, noise levels, light pollution and last but not least the amount of nature (trees, plants, lakes etc.) an area has. Some of these factors have possible direct influence on others just as the amount of nature usually indicates better air quality as well.
The main goal of this project is to get some insights on exactly how much the well-being of citizens is affected by environmental factors and if people living in lower-income areas are in a worse position regarding the access to healthy living environments. We also want to see if the recently promised advancements towards fixing these problems have actually proved to be successful and beneficial.
We thus would like to take the reader on a small journey where we can hopefully show them how much nature actually matters in our every day lives.
Our focus will solely be on New York City for a few reasons:
- New York City has a fairly developed data platform which is open for the public and contains important datasets like air quality surveillance, collection of anonimized 311 report and poverty, and tree distribution data.
- It's also one of the most environmentally green cities in the world with approx. 57% of it's area being covered in some kind of nature.
- Last but not least it is one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the world making it a good target for research.
We are going to analyze New York City data both from a social and an enviromental aspect, by using the previously mentioned data on trees, air pollution, 311 complaints and poverty, to see what effects they have on one another. The observed period of time is between 2005 and 2015, let's jump right into it. First let's have a look at the number of air quality related complaints over the years. But why air quality?
Air pollution is one of the most important environmental threats to urban populations and while all people are exposed, pollutant emissions, levels of exposure, and population vulnerability vary across neighborhoods. Exposures to common air pollutants have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and premature deaths.
And for completeness' sake let's have a look at it using geospatial analysis.
It would be too early to deduce any sort of conclusions from these alone, let alone say that nothing has changed over the years. First let's dive a little bit deeper into what 311 requests are: 311 is a toll-free number that allows people in the District to request assistance with city services and information. Because it is easy to use and easy to remember, 311 can help improve service delivery to residents, workers, and visitors in the nation's capital.
So anybody who asks for assistance or just wants to query information can call this number. What other aspects are contained within the data? Well most often than not the requests are for air quality issues, like odor, fumes, dust and smoke (see the plot below). So does this mean anything?
Health surveys of New york City citizens are available since 2010. We can take a look at the correlation between the number of air quality related 311 requests and the self-reported health status. What we can see is that there is a low negative correlation between them (-0.3611), meaning that an increase in the number of requests slightly influences people's self-reported health negatively.
Well this doesn't say much. How about we introduced a new kind of dataset? Instead of looking at reports let's look at actual measurements of NYC. The air quality dataset contains information on New York City air quality surveillance data. These indicators provide a perspective across time and NYC geographies to better characterize air quality and health.
So how about different chemical concentrations in the air? Two pollutants, particulate matter and ground-level ozone, are of particular health concern, so we'll reduce the area of observations to only these two metritcs.